


they shall run and not be weary

by satellites (brella)



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 18:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Special skills: Unfailing optimism, quirky pop culture references. “No, no, honey,” your mom chides you, so instead you fib and write "punctuality."</p>
            </blockquote>





	they shall run and not be weary

**Author's Note:**

> If I could write a billion words on Hunter, I would.

**i.**

_“It’s just one question,” the doctor soothes him, his freezing hands clasping Hunter’s shoulders until Hunter tears his eyes away from the assistant and fixes them on the doctor’s ice blue ones. “And it’s very easy. Breathe. Breathe nice and slowly and think of your candy bar, all right?”_

_Mercifully, silence lapses, and Hunter does as he’s told, shuddering in a breath and blinking back his tears._

_“There’s a lad,” the doctor whispers, nodding. “Now, Hunter, this next question is very important, so I need you to be concentrate as hard as you can and be completely honest with me. Can you do that?”_

_Hunter manages a bob of his head._

_“Think before you answer,” the doctor says._ (“Hunter! Wake up, for Pete’s sake!”) _“Tell me – what did you see when your eyes were opened?”_

Frigid water hits your face and tears you up out of sleep like a hook in your heart, and you flail back into consciousness spluttering and cursing.

“Good grief. What kind of language is that to use around your mom?”

You spit wordlessly and wipe your cold-bristled face frantically with the sleeve of your thermal pajama shirt. You must shoot your mother an especially disgruntled glare, because she releases a boisterous chuckle that crinkles the corners of her closed eyes and shows her uneven teeth and makes the blue polka dots on her blouse seem to bounce with life.

“What?” she defends. The pale wintry sunlight is no match for her warm pinkish skin, for her fiery hair that frames her beaming cheeks with purposeful untidiness. “Don’t give me that look, mister; you’re the one who sleeps like you oughta be six feet under; what was I supposed to do?”

“Aw, Mom,” you whine, flopping back into your pillow and yanking the down comforter over your head.

“Hunter, darling,” your mother croons in that cheery-threatening way that only she can. “Testing me before eight o’clock in the morning is unwise. There is _plenty_ more ice water where this came from.”

“All right, I’m going, I’m going,” you grumble until she leaves, and when you hear the door shut behind her, you haven’t the faintest idea why you start crying.  

 

* * *

 

 

**ii.**

Your mother is a gardener. Tomatoes and stargazer lilies seem to sprout from the earth at her command, and she shows you how to pick them all with the same care with which the butterflies land on them, even though half the time, you’d rather be watching TV.

You are five when you do it. The gloves she uses are faded green, and though they’re worn down and stretched a little more every day, they never tear. You’re always wary to put on the orange pair she has for you, because you’re afraid a highly poisonous spider will be lurking in one of the fingers.

“What a wuss,” your mother teases you lovingly in the summer sun, the brim of her straw hat shading her light-splashed face and her thick red braid. (She’d always had the most beautiful hair.) She’s sitting cross-legged in the grass, eating Raisinets with enthusiasm. They’re her favorite.

“I’m not a wuss,” you protest, and the end sound whistles a little through the gap left by the front tooth you’ve just lost. You still don’t put the gloves on, though. You hunker down in front of the morning glory vine and reach out a bare hand, and when you touch one of the flowers, it happens.

Maybe for the first time; maybe not. You can’t remember any others, at least, but then again, you’re _five_ , for Christ’s sake. What you do remember is coming to in your bedroom, under your Buzz Lightyear quilt, and vaguely hearing your parents yelling at each other in the living room – your mom shouting that you were special, your dad vehemently denying it.

“I don’t want my son going through life thinking he’s better than the rest of the world,” your dad bellows. “He’s got to have his goddamn _head_ on straight—”

“He _does_ – he _will_!” your mom hurls back. “But you didn’t see what I saw; you didn’t _see_ what he—”

“It was a hot day outside.” Your father is using his Doctor Tone now, cold and stony. “He probably just got a little heat stroke and you let the sun get to your head; you spend way too much time out of the shade in that damn garden of yours—”

“How dare you.” Your mother’s voice is so magnificent, a thousand splendid suns. You focus your eyes on the glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling and try to find the big dipper. “Fine. Fine, then; if you can’t accept him – if you can’t accept what he _is_ – then…”

A silence grows, then, like the frost on the autumn lawn.

“Then maybe you oughta step away,” she finishes, and two weeks later, your father’s shaving cream is gone from the bathroom counter; and four weeks later, a judge asks you who you’d rather live with, in front of _everyone_ , and you just want to go to outer space and save a princess so you stay indoors instead of making friends and your dad doesn’t call on Christmas.

(It doesn’t matter, though. You and your mom settle onto the couch and turn on the TV, the way you do every night, and you eat microwave dinners and laugh at all the same parts. "Don't make snow angels," she tells you. "That's boring. Make snow dragons, and then slay them." So you do.)

 

* * *

 

**iii.**

You hate running, but you’re pretty good at it if you actually try.

Your mom loves all that stuff – hiking, jogging, swimming, rock-climbing, pulling the open air into her eager lungs like it belongs solely there and she’s just taking what’s hers. You’re a lot more like your dad; no taste for nonessential physical activity.

Despite that, you go out for the track team in junior high. “Just imagine you’re running really late for something more important than anything in the world,” your mom suggests, so you do. You imagine you’re Marty McFly and lightning never strikes twice, and your mile time is eight minutes and thirteen seconds. Your mom gets a funny look in her eye when you tell her that, but you make the team, and that’s what matters. After you bound over the finish line, you lie out of breath on the ground, your legs burning, and in that exact second you feel like you could get up and never stop running, hurtling toward the horizon until all of Earth falls away behind you and turns into stardust.

“You blow me away, champ,” your mom exclaims over the canned Campbell’s chicken noodle she’d made for dinner. “I told you you could do it.”

“You always say that,” you mumble through your grin.

She folds her arms across the table and smirks.

“’Cause I always know,” she tells you warmly, and you can’t help believing her. “Now. Eat your soup and tell me what you did today.”

 

* * *

 

 

**iv.**

When you’re a baby, they always find you up in your crib when they could’ve sworn they’d just put you in your high chair downstairs, or on the roof when you were definitely in the bathtub only seconds ago.

Your father responds by strapping you into things more tightly, watching you more vigilantly, but your mother is not even the slightest bit perturbed.

“He goes where he goes,” she says calmly while you sleep, stroking your tuft of orange with one soft, earth-riven hand. “He goes when he goes.”

(Your father has even more trouble explaining it when, after you cut your hand open on a kitchen knife when you’re four and too dumb to know any better, the gash is gone within half an hour, as though it had never been there at all.)

“When isn’t a place, honey,” your father sighs wearily, but your mother cups your cheek and leans down to kiss the crown of your head and whispers, “My son the explorer.”

 

* * *

 

 

**v.**

You’re at your dad’s for the weekend when the call comes. You sit with Andy and watch Pokémon reruns while your dad strides into the kitchen from his study to answer the phone, and you don’t realize until two episodes are over that he still hasn’t come back out.

You glance at the gold watch on your wrist to make sure you’re not just nuts. 8:13, it says. Okay.

You find him sitting at the table with his forehead in one propped-up hand and an untouched glass of scotch in front of him. He seems grayer, more harshly hewn, more exhausted than you’ve ever seen him (than he’s ever let you see).

“Dad?” you ask, and it feels like the last noise in the world you should be making.

He looks up sharply and, in an instant, changes – his shoulders straighten and the grim line of his mouth softens and he’s all business.

“Hunter,” he greets you, and stands. “You… may want to sit down.”

You don’t know why you do. You sink into the chair opposite his, but he remains on his feet, lifting his hands after a moment so that he can gesticulate them gently in front of his chest while he speaks. You’ve seen him like this before, at the hospital.

“I’m afraid your…” he says, and then sighs. “I’m afraid your mother has terminal cancer.”

You swear, later, that your ears filled up with bees. You stare, blank-eyed and numb in the chest, up at your father, who seems miles taller now, and only the day before yesterday, your mom had been too tired to watch _Star Trek_ after dinner; only this morning you’d just figured that she wasn’t answering the phone because she was out for a walk. Your throat thins and folds shut and crushes your heart inside of it.

“I’m so sorry,” the man in front of you says dully, more a doctor than a father.

You do the only thing you know how to.

You run.  

 

* * *

 

**vi.**

You and Aunt Linda take it upon yourselves to make sure she’s never alone in that hospital room. It’s pretty nice, as far as rooms go; it’s got a TV and a window and lots of space; and she gets it all to herself. You know that, really, the latter isn’t a very good sign, but she always tried to teach you to look on the bright side, so you pretend to.

She gets mad at you a few times for spending the night in the uncomfortable chair next to her bed. she sure as heck hopes, she says, that you have a life outside of her, especially _now_ , and the weight she puts on the word “now” makes you want to throw up. Her voice no longer sounds like sunshine, but ash.

You feel really shitty, too, because only half of the reason you keep staying there is that you don’t want her to be by herself. The other half is that you’d rather sleep in a gutter for all you care than in the guest room at your dad’s new wife, Angela’s, house. She’s okay, and everything, but she makes your dad give her all of this money so she can remodel stuff that doesn’t even need remodeling, in your opinion, like the attic, which they only use for storage; and she really doesn’t like you very much because you are sentient, interactive proof that the man she’s now married to has, at one point, boned a woman who isn’t her. She never calls you by your name, always finding some tactful way around it, and she gets annoyed when you try to show her son, Andy, your comics.

Andy’s all right, though. He’s the only one you can be around without feeling like a stain on the wall, but he keeps calling you “Uncle Hunter,” which, while kind of funny the first few times, is more than a little weird, you’re now starting to realize. You figure Angela’s behind it; she makes an active effort to make sure that Andy doesn’t treat you like a sibling. You can’t be _that_ much a part of the family.

So you take refuge with your mom, the way you always do, and the both of you watch reruns of your favorite TV shows and you listen to her laugh get more and more wan every day and you stop doing your homework.

When they start the chemo, they say it will take away the cancer, but all it takes away is her ability to hold things without her hands trembling; it sucks the color out of her cheeks and the heat out of her swollen feet and, one evening, while you read _The Invisibles_ and wait for her to finish her shower and fling the book aside when you hear her start to cry (the only time you ever have, ever will), it takes away all of her fire-doused hair.

You and Aunt Linda buy her a red silk headscarf and she loves it, wrapping it around her smooth, bare, veined head with her palpitating fingers no matter how many times you try to tell her that you can help. She beams at you brightly, but her eyebrows are gone now, too, so it’s an incomplete expression that makes your stomach sink instead of rising. They don’t let her have Raisinets in the hospital, so she smiles even wider when you sneak in those.

“I swear, they’re feeding me hamster food,” she tells you. “That nurse – she’s a shifty one. Vegetarian, no doubt.”

“ _Mom_ ,” you half chastise her fondly, positioned sideways in the chair while you read your _Doom Patrol_.

“Don’t give me that ‘Mom’ business. Put that comic down and tell me what you did today,” she murmurs, her hands folded now at her practically concave stomach. (She hadn’t actually eaten any of the Raisinets, but you hadn’t noticed.) You never feel like your days are much worth talking about, but you recount every detail for her anyway, even though you know it doesn’t do much in the way of vicarious stimulation.

“I got punched in the face by that guy I told you about.” “I’m kinda in trouble with the principal for eight tardies in a row.” “Volume Four of _X-Men_ came in the mail!” “No, I didn’t send it in yet.”

Special skills: Unfailing optimism, quirky pop culture references. “No, no, honey,” your mom chides you, so instead you fib and write _punctuality_.

Why do you believe you would be a worthy addition to Morning Glory Academy? You have no fucking clue, so you ask your mom, but she shakes her head and mischievously replies, “Can’t help you with that one, champ. That’s an answer you’ll have to find yourself. You have to do a _little_ work once in a while. Always asking questions…”

So you take a pen and write, _I guess I’ll find out when I get there_.

 

* * *

 

 

**vii.**

"Why'd you name me what you did?" you ask her curiously when you're fourteen. "I mean, I don't exactly scream 'skilled marksman,' or anything..." 

She just laughs, the way she always does, soft and knowing, and ruffles your hair. 

"Because you're always after something," she tells you. "With that big ol' sniffer of yours." You're not quite sure what she means, and your large nose has been a source of mockery since kindergarten, so you wind up focusing more on being miffed than you do on what she'd said. 

You fill up an entire Mother's Day card with the longest and most sincere and most frightened thing you've ever tried to articulate to her; you scrawl across every blank corner with the words you know this might be your last chance to say.

She's too tired to read it herself and when you try, your throat starts to close up and your hands to shake so you just set it on her bedside table once she falls asleep. When you come to visit the next day, it's not there anymore. The nurse accidentally threw it away.

 

* * *

 

 

**viii.**

The day of the funeral, you sit on the edge of your dad’s couch with your hands clasped in your lap and the collar of your suit itching the back of your neck. You feel like you ought to be praying to something, but you don’t have any idea what, and you never believed in that kind of crap anyway. It’d feel kind of insulting, only starting to research it when you had your own selfish reason to, and anyway, for all of the talk your mom had about seeing what comes after, you know that she’d probably only been saying it to try to make you feel better.

She’s—fuck, she _was_ always trying to make you feel better.

You stare and stare and stare at the grandfather clock until your eyes are burning, and you haven’t really slept since the sound of the flatlining heart monitor had sliced you out of it days ago, because in dreams you see her and she sounds too real and you can’t tell the goddamn difference anymore.

When you come to, the room is dark with deep evening, and your dad is jostling your shoulder sharply. Your eyes snap apart and you sit bolt upright and leap off of the couch, but your dad grips your arm and wrenches you back down and shouts, “That’s _enough_ , Hunter. You already missed it.”

And that, finally, days and hours and moments too late, is when you start to cry. You cry until your ribs feel like they're about to puncture the skin on your back, and you bury your face in your hands, and your father only scoffs at you and leaves you there, and there's nobody you can call anymore, nobody who'll bother listening, nobody who'll bother asking.

 

* * *

 

 

**ix.**

There’s a reason you don’t move in with your dad. When the friends you don’t have at school don’t ask you why, you mentally reply that it’s because his house is too far from the bus stop and it’s better for you, with your chronic lateness, to be closer to that kind of stuff, but you know it’s a lie.

Aunt Linda is out of town, though, visiting Mom’s family in the Midwest, so you’re stuck with your dad for at least a month after the hospital room you’d spent countless afternoons in is vacated. Mr. Mackey asks you if everything’s okay, because you haven’t been turning in your homework and you’ve stopped just being late and gone on to not going at _all_ , and you’re not about to tell him that you cut class to sit in front of her tombstone and tell her what you did today.

On Friday night, your dad is talking to the principal on the phone, standing beside the television and glowering down at you with every passing second he has to listen to the woman on the other line tell him about all the messing up you do. You sit on the couch pretending to be reading your vintage _Zenith_ even though your hands are shaking, and you hear him calmly say, “Yes, yes. I’m a doctor.”

Goosebumps jolt up your arms, down your legs, and you surge to your feet and whirl on him.

“Some kind of fucking doctor _you_ turned out to be, Dad!” you scream before you can get ahold of yourself, before you can shut out the black and curdled words that won’t stop encroaching the inside of your throat if you close your eyes too tightly. Spit flies from your mouth and though your eyes are swimming, the edges of your vision keep pulsing with red. “You could’ve made her better, but you didn’t! Show off that fucking paper on the wall next time somebody asks you about her! _You didn’t make her any fucking better_ , did you?! _Did you_?!”

You tear out of the living room and fling open the front door, hurtling down the driveway and half-tripping when your bare foot hits a rock and sends a jolt of pain up your shin. You run and run and run and the summer night settles into dark around you until your hair makes you look like a streak of fire, until the soles of your feet are scraped and tingling and your lungs feel like they’re about to pucker into nothing. You don’t even realize until you’re crying on your knees and curling shaking fingers into the still-warm grass that you’ve gone all the way to the cemetery.

 _In loving memory_ , the tombstone says, and you feel like you haven’t sobbed this hard, in such sloppy and noisy howls that heave out of you for far too long, since you were an infant wailing at the new bright coldness of the world, only calmed when she took you into her exhausted arms, red hair stuck to her face and cheeks round with her triumphant smile, and whispered, “You’re okay, little guy. Mommy’s got you now.”

 

* * *

**  
x.**

The earth pressing dents into your bloodied skin has been worn barren by too many footsteps. The pain around the bullet hole in your shoulder feels murky and tepid, even though your entire right side is numb and the fissures between your fingers are running with red.

The forest flutters into indistinguishable dark and you close your eyes, breathing heavily in and out through your open mouth like a winded animal, and your feet kick feebly at the dirt of their own accord like they’re still trying to sprint you away from this place.

You think you’re going to die. Doesn’t feel as bad as you’d always thought. Maybe it’s kind of a relief, because you’re so _tired_.

“Hunter,” your mother’s voice whispers in your ear, lessening the pain into only a thread that trails down the center of your arm; and you know she can’t possibly be there, can’t possibly be petting your hair. “Tell me what you did today.”

“Nothin’ much,” you say softly, and her arms close around you and she smells like the snow on Christmas morning and she’s smiling when she murmurs, “That sounds like a lot of fun, kiddo.”


End file.
